Forum:Article links
When I first came to this wiki i found the article placement extremely hard to understand. I began thinking that if a relatively compentent wiki user like myself couldn't understand it, then how would a new use go on, they would probably just click that back button. So, i think there needs to be a big rethink of how its done. --'Anarchyuk' ' (talk)'( )(To-do) 18:49, 20 January 2008 (UTC) Current Situation (According to original policies and article templates) *The format for article titles is as follow, but when in doubt, look at the template file when it applies: **Artist: Artist **Album/EP/Single: Album-name:Artist-name **Song: Song-name:Artist-name The problem with this is that the colon (:) is used for denoting namespaces like help: and template: And also with that formatting you cannot make use of the pipe trick Dyaimz's Suggestion I noted some suggestions here: Talk:A Quick Way To Generate Tracklistings For Mixes And Compilations, Using Microsoft Excel And Word:Essay I'll bring the discussion here instead: There are 4 ways of writing titles that allow the band & the album to be differentiated by the wiki software so that pipe-trick can be used. *band-name/album-name *band-name:album-name *album-name, band-name *album-name (band-name) Unfortunately, none of these match the current article-title-style. The colon style is band-name:album-name rather than album-name:band-name but there is also the problem that the colon is not preferred because it is used to denote different name-spaces. It also shares a disadvantage with band-name/album-name that in the Category lists it is easier to scan down the list if the album or song is first rather than the band. So that leaves us the comma or the parentheses options. No rationale was ever given for the present article-title-style but it is quite neat looking, so in that spirit I would recommend the comma format over the parentheses as being the closest visually to what is presently being done as well as bringing the advantages in editing of using pipe-tricks and losing the problems of clashing name-spaces. Anarchyuk's 2 Cent's The album-name, band-name format seems to be the best idea as allowing the pipe trick will save some time. Another possibilty is; * for an album then - album-name * for a song - song-name * if there is an album and song or self-titled album by a group then - album-name (album) and - song-name (song). Then a disambigution page could be put it Discussion This is open to discussion because there needs to be a wide consenus on what is the best thing to do i think the best option would be the parentheses. it allows for the pipe trick to be used, it is easier to spot the album title when browsing (versus sub-pages, aka Band/Album), and parentheses are less likely to be used in an album name than a comma would, imo. just b/c this isn't wikipedia, doesn't mean we can't learn from their experience. also, it looks better than commas, imo. another reason the Album (Artist) option is better than Artist/Album is for those albums that have various artists (such as soundtracks, etc). – : To my knowledge the / method has never been actively used, at least i have never used it. You will find many of the old pages using the colon method, and pages since i arrived (october 2007) using the comma method. Thinking about it now the parentheses option does sound very good, it works for wikipedia so why not us. However changes will require a lot of moving pages, by bot or manually. So Dani could you sum up your idea in some bullet points so that i am understanding you correctly? :Anarchyuk (talk) ( ) 12:24, 7 June 2008 (UTC)